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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25640962">My hands shake like jellyfish when you’re near</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles'>SquaresAreNotCircles</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hawaii Five-0 (2010)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Developing Relationship, Holding Hands, M/M, Post-Canon, Slice of Life, by about one week, not compliant with the last few minutes of h50 episode 10.22, this one is more of a finale ending retcon than a fix-it, zero catherine bashing because cath and steve are still good friends</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 11:34:38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,647</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25640962</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>“So you had a dream?” he asks, settling in for some kind of story. He grins. “Was it about me?”</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>Danny pulls a face like he doesn’t want to answer, which tells Steve all he needs to know. His very good day is instantly turned into a pretty great day. “Much as it pains me to say this, yes,” Danny adds, which tells everyone else what Steve already knew.</em>
</p>
<p>Or: Shrimp is eaten and hands are held, just not on a plane. Sometimes a happy end is a lot closer to home than one might think.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>282</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>My hands shake like jellyfish when you’re near</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is the very, very first fix-it I started writing after watching the finale, which is why it’s a bit of a, uh, sledgehammer-esque approach.</p>
<p>The title is a line from <em>Cheetah Tongue</em> by The Wombats, which I chose mostly because it had hands and seafood in it and that kind of works, probably!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Exactly one week after Danny is kidnapped and then rescued, Steve wakes up, packs a bag and heads out on his own, when it’s still early enough that Waimanalo isn’t swamped by tourists yet. He’s alone with the sun, the sand, the sea and his surfboard, and it’s like therapy, except better because nobody is pushing him to talk about Doris. </p>
<p>By the time he parks the Chevy in its now customary spot next to the Camaro in the driveway again, the day is nearing its midpoint and he feels satisfied he’s done enough surfing to make even Kono proud. He’s in a good mood when he enters the house – more centered and relaxed than he’s been all week, or all month, even – but it seems he’s an outlier. Danny is sitting on the couch, reading an actual paper newspaper he must have picked up somewhere just to look even more like a grouchy and grumpy old man. Danny’s temporary cane, leaning against the couch next to him, does nothing to detract from the image.</p>
<p>“Yo,” Steve tells him, dropping his bag by the stairs. He doesn’t let the fact that he only gets a grunt in reply slow him down. “Wanna grab some lunch?” Junior exits the kitchen as he’s asking, so Steve jumps on him, too. “Junes, you up for shrimp?”</p>
<p>Junior is, and says he’ll ask Tani, because they were making plans to meet up this afternoon anyway. By then Danny still hasn’t made any noise that isn’t caveman speak, so Steve decides to take that as a yes and heads upstairs to dump his stuff and grab two thirds of a Navy shower, just to feel a little better about changing into fresh clothes.</p>
<p>They head to Kamekona’s, which technically isn’t the closest place where they could get really good shrimp, but Kame is ohana and also might poison their next meal if they cheat on him with another supplier of whiskered seafood. Danny is in a grumpy, monosyllabic, introverted mood on the entire ride over. The one time Steve tries to ask him what’s up, he gets a “nothing” and a nasty look, so he exchanges a glance with Junior through the rearview mirror and stops asking. Waiting may not be his strong suit, but with Danny, sometimes it’s the only option.</p>
<p>That, or metaphorically slamming his head into a wall to knock some sense into him, but they’re not there yet. Getting there, though, with every unhappily grunted reply.</p>
<p>Danny keeps it up all he way through Steve and Junior’s dinner, which means until halfway through Tani and Danny’s, when there’s a lull in the conversation that seems to coincide with the moment he’s finally ready to say words again. “So I had a dream,” he reveals at long last, still very grave to the backdrop of sun, sea, sand and a shrimp truck.</p>
<p>Steve eyes him. He frequently claims he wants more silence from Danny, but it’s a relief to have it broken. “You had a dream?”</p>
<p>“Yes, I had a dream. Don’t make an MLK thing out of it.”</p>
<p>“Wasn’t gonna,” Steve says, even though he’d still been undecided.</p>
<p>Tani waves a shrimp at him like she’s auditioning for the role of Danny Williams. “Probably for the best,” she tells him. She might be right. </p>
<p>Time to remind Danny he was about to recount something very dramatically. </p>
<p>“So you had a dream?” he asks, settling in for some kind of story. He grins. “Was it about me?”</p>
<p>Danny pulls a face like he doesn’t want to answer, which tells Steve all he needs to know. His very good day is instantly turned into a pretty great day. “Much as it pains me to say this, yes,” Danny adds, which tells everyone else what Steve already knew.</p>
<p>“Aww.” He puts a closed fist to his chest, like he might just swoon. “That’s very flattering, Danny. What did I do?”</p>
<p>Danny looks at him in a way that’s kind of alarming. It has a suspicious note to it, like he needs to keep a close eye because Steve is about to jump up and do something that’s necessary for some important reason but will require putting himself in lethal danger. Steve is not aware of any such plan on his part, but the impending doom foretold on Danny’s face gives him a shot of adrenaline by association. “You left the island,” Danny announces.</p>
<p>Well, that’s an anticlimax. “So what you should’ve said is that you had a nightmare,” Steve quips. It doesn’t come out as light as he wants it to. Danny’s gravitas is catching.</p>
<p>“You were running off with Catherine.”</p>
<p>That reminds him he needs to give Catherine a call. He hasn’t really talked to her in a bunch of months. “You have strange dreams,” he informs Danny. “They seem a little stuck in the past.”</p>
<p>Danny stabs his fork into his little shrimp container, somehow giving the impression that it was a tossup between that and Steve’s hand without having to add anything else. “You left me behind.”</p>
<p>Things click for Steve, at this point, because they can’t not. It’s still a bit of an off tune sound, though. “And that’s why you’ve been mad all afternoon? You’re angry with me for something I did in a dream?” He narrowly refrains from rolling his eyes, which probably wouldn’t be very constructive in this current situation. “Danny, you know that’s not real, right?” </p>
<p>“Do I?” Danny shoots back, because of course he’d rather question reality than fictions fed to him by his own mind while he was literally out of it. “What if it is?”</p>
<p>Steve is in too good a mood to be offended, which just leaves him confused about Danny’s newfound belief that he’s a prophet. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to take that.”</p>
<p>Danny harrumphs. “Well, with a little more urgency might be nice.”</p>
<p>“What do you want me to do? Apologize for my behavior in your head?”</p>
<p>“That would be a good start, yes!”</p>
<p>Steve looks at Junior, who seems to be trying to stay as neutral as possible and also steal some of Tani’s shrimp, and then at Tani, who raises her eyebrows at him expectantly and pretends not to notice where Junior’s fork is going. Neither of them is any help. “Alright,” he says, but he makes it as purposefully obstinate as he can. “Dear Danny, I am very sorry your brain is an idiot.”</p>
<p>“I hate you,” Danny says, but drily. In that way that sounds like “I can’t just tell you that was good enough, but I already yelled my way through my emotions and so it kind of was, so I’m allowing you to drop the issue by not arguing back against what you’re saying but being an ass about it anyway”.</p>
<p>Steve, however, decides he’s not done yet. He’s a little insulted by Danny’s dreams now, real or not, and whether Danny had any choice in the matter or not. “Here, I’ll hold your hand again.” He offers up his own, palm open on the table. “Will that make you feel better, buddy?”</p>
<p>Of course what he didn’t count on – what he’s never truly been able to predict, in spite of everything – is Danny’s response. Danny knows the games Steve plays, and even after a decade of smoothing out every step and twirl of their back and forth, he still occasionally invents entirely new moves that Steve doesn’t see coming. </p>
<p>Which is to say, Danny looks at their companions across the table, looks at Steve, looks at the offered hand, and slips his own into it with zero further hesitation, like this is a thing they do outside of hospital rooms, ever. “Sure,” Danny says, obnoxiously agreeable all of a sudden. Steve is not the only one who can layer it on. His bluff has been called through a megaphone. “Thanks.”</p>
<p>Steve tries to pull his hand back, but he only gets a few inches before giving up, because Danny is pointedly not letting him go. “Huh,” he says, left to watch Danny shovel shrimp into his mouth again, now one-handed. Danny’s fingers are strong, his skin warm, and the contact feels a lot more intimate than it reasonably should. They’re just hands. “Okay.”</p>
<p>“Okay?” Danny asks, in between mouthfuls.</p>
<p>“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, isn’t it? Okay.” He tightens his own grip to show just how okay it is. </p>
<p>“I’ve never seen two people hold hands this passive-aggressively before,” Tani observes. Steve is reminded of the kids’ presence and feels a little awkward about it, but there’s nothing for it now. He is holding Danny’s hand, come hell or high water, because he won’t be the first to back down after Danny has thrown the gauntlet.</p>
<p>“You’re still young,” Danny tells her. “There’s a lot you haven’t seen.”</p>
<p>Junior’s fork with Tani’s shrimp on it gets stranded in the air halfway towards his mouth. “I’ve been to war, but I’m still a little scared of what that’s supposed to mean.”</p>
<p>Steve glances at the side of Danny’s face. Now that Junior has brought it up, he’d like to know the same thing. He is caught, Danny probably sensing that someone is watching him, and in the flicker of a moment before they break eye contact again, Danny isn’t playing coy. He’s not pretending not to know what’s between the lines here. That look, the set of his mouth, the way he turns away – that’s a dare right out in the open, if Steve has ever seen one.</p>
<p>Steve leverages the element of surprise to wriggle his hand free just enough so that he can shift his grip and link their fingers together instead. He’s never backed down from a challenge in his life.</p>
<p>Danny is similarly hopeless at hiding his sudden smile behind his next bite of shrimp.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading!! Did you know "comment" is a synonym for "very cool thing"? ❤</p>
<p>I’m on Tumblr as <a href="https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com">itwoodbeprefect</a>, or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as <a href="https://five-wow.tumblr.com">five-wow</a>.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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